Matt Gade | The Grand Rapids PressLocal landmark: McKay Tower is at the corner of Monroe Avenue NW, Monroe Center and Pearl Street. It was Grand Rapids' tallest building until the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel Tower was built in 1983.

GRAND RAPIDS — In the heart of downtown Grand Rapids stands a storied tower with a history that beats with scandal, cloakroom dealing and politics as hard as its marble-lined hallways.

The 18-story McKay Tower at 146 Monroe Center NW is anchored as firmly in solid bedrock as it is in local lore. The site, which was the location of the area’s first non-Indian marriage in the 1830s, possibly is the spot where a high-profile murder plot was hatched in 1945.

Self-made millionaire Frank D. McKay purchased the skyscraper from the Grand Rapids National Bank in 1942 and promptly named the building after himself, literally cementing his name in local history. At the time, he was at the height of his power within the Republican Party, which controlled most of the state government.

Frank McKay

Known to many as “Boss” McKay, the son of poor Scottish immigrants in Grand Rapids became the power behind the throne of at least two governors and beat multiple attempts by federal prosecutors to pin corruption charges on him during the 1930s and ’40s.

“McKay was a kingmaker,” said Bruce Rubenstein, a University of Michigan history professor and co-author of “Three Bullets Sealed His Lips,” an exhaustively researched book published in 1987 about the purported murder-for-hire of state Sen. Warren G. Hooper in 1945.

"He was the silent governor running the state through the people he got elected,” Rubenstein said.

Starting in Kent County during the 1920s and ’30s, McKay gradually built a political machine that held an iron grip on state politics. A Home Front reform movement that included Gerald R. Ford eventually deposed him as the Republican Party czar in the late 1940s.

Along the way, McKay was elected state treasurer three times between 1924 and 1931. He left office amid accusations of cronyism and misuse of state funds.

But it wasn’t until 1945 when the scrutiny intensified following the gangland-style assassination of Hooper three days before he was to testify before a grand jury investigating alleged corruption in the Michigan Legislature.

McKay’s courtroom nemesis was Kim Sigler, a special prosecutor with a sharp tongue hoping to launch himself into national political office using a McKay conviction as his springboard.

Using prison inmate testimony, Rubenstein and the late Michigan State University professor Lawrence Ziewacz argue in “Three Bullets” that McKay paid for and orchestrated Hooper’s murder through connections to the notorious Purple Gang mob members at Jackson State Prison.

Although it was widely believed the killers were men allowed to slip in and out of the prison by officials on the take, Rubenstein and Ziewacz wrote Sigler chose to press — and lose — the case against McKay rather than target the assassins themselves.

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McKay Tower

Located at 146 Monroe Center NW, the McKay Tower is built atop the original four-story Grand Rapids National Bank. The original bank lobby on the second floor is one of the most impressive spaces downtown, located in a building that also boasts the city’s only mail chute still in use today.

First to the top: From the early 1940s, when the last two stories were added, to 1983, when the Amway Grand Tower was finished, the McKay Tower was the tallest building between Detroit and Chicago.

Bird’s-eye view: In the mid-1980s, McKay Tower was a release site in a University of Minnesota re-population program for peregrine falcons, said John Will, a life insurance agent and longtime tower tenant. The tower’s nesting box was moved to the Kent County Courthouse a couple of years ago.

Namesake: Frank D. McKay bought the tower from the bank in 1942 and maintained a luxurious two-room office suite on the ground floor. He willed the 145,000-square-foot building to the University of Michigan upon his death. The university sold it in 2000. The tower currently is owned by Mark Roller of Spring Lake and managed by Fusion Properties of Grand Rapids.

Through it all — the indictments, the press coverage, the barbs back and forth with Sigler — McKay steadfastly maintained himself as a man more concerned with business, Rotary Club and church on Sunday than with skulduggery and politics.

McKay owned or had an interest in furniture companies, theaters, tires, oil and gas, brewing companies and other real estate over the years. His estimated worth was around $2 million when he died in Florida, where he owned a large hotel in Miami Beach, in 1965 at the age of 81.

His personal papers were willed to the University of Michigan, along with ownership of the tower, upon his death. The papers have been carefully laundered, Rubenstein said, to reflect only accolades and paint a picture of a civic-minded businessman.

“I never ‘bossed’ anybody,” McKay told the Detroit Free Press in 1963. “’Boss’ is what the newspapers call you when they don’t like you. If they like you, you’re a ‘political leader.’”

Nonetheless, the Free Press noted, the term “boss” stuck because McKay, a man who once bragged about being able to tell reporters who the party nominees were prior to the convention vote, was that kind of political leader.